Evidence of cognitive chunking in freehand sketching during design ideation

摘要

This paper reports a human-subject protocol study examining the cognitive process of freehand sketching during design ideation and presents empirical evidence for the presence of chunking during sketching. Volunteer designers sketched solution concepts to unseen design problems using a homegrown software program on a tablet computer to draw their sketches, which performed a time study and identified pen stroke clusters. These clusters were found to be strongly correlated with the sketched objects that the designers voluntarily named during labelling, irrespective of the object's containment level in the sketched solution. The frequent occurrence of single-private clusters, where all pen strokes in a cluster are used to draw a single named object, provides evidence for cognitive chunking during ideation sketching. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.